Emerging JavaScript pattern: multiple return values
In this article, I want to explore an interesting pattern that I am seeing more and more in JavaScript code which allows you to return multiple values from a function. You probably know already that JavaScript does not support multiple return values natively, so this article will actually explore some ways to “simulate” this behavior. One of the most famous usages of this pattern I have seen recently is within React Hooks, but before delving into that, let’s see what I mean with “multiple return values” by…
AWS Solution Architect Associate exam, my notes and tips
In this article, I will share some of my notes and tips that might be useful if you are studying to get the AWS Solution Architect Associate Certification. I recently took this certification and I have to admit it was a little bit more challenging than I originally expected. I have been using a variety of AWS services professionally in the last 3 years, so I was optimistically expecting this practical experience to be enough. In reality, I had to spend some time to study and fill some gaps about important…
AWS Command line: S3 content from stdin or to stdout
This article presents a quick tip that will help you deal with the content of files in S3 through the AWS command line in a much faster and simpler way. Did you ever want to simply print the content of a file in S3 from your command line and maybe pipe the output to another command? Or maybe, did you ever needed to pipe the standard output of a sequence of commands directly into a file in S3? I had this need multiple times and, before my amazing colleague Paul made me discover the tip I am about to describe…
2017 - A year in review
2017 is over and it’s time to sit down and see what happened during this year. As I already did last year, I would love to write a (potentially boring) recap of all the good and bad things (mostly from a career perspective) that happened in my life during this year. Last year I promised myself I would keep doing this as a way to keep track and benchmark my productivity over the coming years, so here I am to see how I performed! The year of conference talks! Let’s start with a big win! This was the year of…
From bare metal to Serverless
Lately, I tried to understand why modern cloud computing brought us to the idea (and growing adoption) of “Serverless”. In this article, I will illustrate the result of a small research I did about the history of Cloud computing from the age of bare metal to serverless. “You have to know the past to understand the present.” ― Carl Sagan At the end of this article, I will also illustrate a definition of Serverless and what are its main characteristics. The invention of the web This story starts with Sir Tim…
Using Let’s Encrypt and Certbot to automate the creation of certificates for OpenVPN
Recently at Planet 9 Energy, I had to setup a VPN access to secure some of our internal services. One of the requirements was to make the provisioning easy to reproduce over multiple environments, so we ended up playing a bit with Terraform, while obviously adopting OpenVPN for the VPN server. Another important requirement was to expose the OpenVPN web interface (also called Access Server) using an SSL, which I was expecting to be one of the most challenging things to automate, instead, it turned out to be…
My Serverless talk at Shift conference in Split
This June, I had an amazing experience talking again about Serverless and how we use it at Planet 9 Energy at the recent Shift Conference in Split, Croatia. In my talk titled ”Serverless: The pros and cons of building a company without infrastructure”, I tried to address what Serverless is and why is becoming such a big thing, also exploring what I believe are the pros and cons of this new paradigm. The experience was great and I was super happy to have a chance to share the stage with extraordinary people…
My Universal JavaScript Web Applications talk at Codemotion Rome 2017
Last month (March 25th) I had the pleasure of delivering again my Universal JavaScript talk in a Codemotion Event, this time in Rome. As expected it was a super interesting event and it gave me the chance to meet fantastic people, attend inspiring talks and refine my presentation. Judo Heroes Version 2 For this occasion, I updated my common Universal JavaScript Judo Heroes to ”Version 2“. I believe this new version looks a bit more polished and easy to understand, plus it features a number of other relevant…
Unshorten (expand) short URLs with Node.js
Short URLs have been an invaluable tool for social media marketing for so many years and we are now used to seeing them everywhere. Most of the credit probably goes to URL shorteners services like Bit.ly, Goo.gl, YOURLS and Rebrandly that popularised the concept and made easy for everyone to start creating short URLs. When working with URLs in some automation scenarios like analytics, information crawling, data retrieval, etc. it can be important to resolve (or ”unshorten” or ”expand”) short URLs, which…
My Serverless & AWS Lambda talk at Node.js Dublin January 2017
Last January I had the pleasure to share the stage with the great Padraig O’Brien to talk about how we use Node.js, AWS Lambda and the Serverless framework at Planet9 Energy. The talk was hosted by the monthly Node.js Dublin Meetup at Intercom Dublin office, as usual, a very cool location for this kind of tech talks. Apart from having a great chance to show off my über cool Super Mario T-shirt for about 45 minutes, Podge and I had some good time discussing the following topics: What does ”Serverless” mean…